Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

He drifted through the room, greeting men he knew, flirting with serving women and the companions of nobles who happened to live in Trapani, and keeping his ears open for gossip. There was plenty; the only trouble was, he didn’t always know to what it referred. When one white-goateed general said to another, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,” what door was he talking about? Whoever was standing behind it wouldn’t care to have it kicked in on him. Of that Sabrino was certain.

A commodore in naval black spoke to a colleague: “Well, this ought to set the history of warfare on the sea back about a thousand years.”

Laughing, his friend answered, “They pay off on what you do. They don’t pay off on how you do it.” Then he noticed Sabrino was listening. Whatever he said after that was in a voice too low for the dragonflier to hear. Annoyed at having been caught, Sabrino took himself elsewhere.

A woman put a hand on his arm. She wasn’t a servant; the green of her silk tunic was darker than that of the national banner, and she wore more gold and emeralds than a servant could even have dreamt of. As Algarvian women sometimes did, she came straight to the point: “My friend’s drunk himself asleep, and I don’t want to go back to my flat alone.”

He looked her up and down. “Your friend, my dear, is a fool. Tell me your name. I want to know whose fool he is.”

“I am Ippalca,” she answered, “and you are the famous Count Sabrino, the man in all the news sheets.”

“My sweet, I was famous long before the news sheets ever heard of me,” Sabrino said. “When we get back to your flat, I will show you why.” Ippalca laughed. Her eyes glowed. Sabrino slid an arm around her waist. Together, they left the Salon of King Aquilante V.

“Efficiency.” Leudast made the word into a curse. It had already doomed a lot of Unkerlanter soldiers. He looked around. After the homelike fields of western Forthweg, this Zuwayzi waste of sunbaked rock and blowing sand seemed a particularly cruel joke.

He checked his water bottle. It was full. He’d filled it at the last water hole, only half a mile or so south of where he was now. The Zuwayzin hadn’t poisoned that one. He’d seen men drink from it, and they’d taken no harm. The naked black savages hadn’t missed many water holes. They weren’t perfectly efficient themselves—just far too close for comfort.

Sergeant Magnulf trudged by. His boots scuffed through sand. His shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. Even his iron determination, which had never faltered during the war against Gyongyos, was wearing thin here. “Tell me again, Sergeant,” Leudast called to him. “Remind me why King Swemmel wants this land bad enough to take it away from anybody. Remind me why anybody who’s got it isn’t happy to give it to the first fool who wants it.”

Magnulf looked at him. “You need to be more efficient with your mouth, soldier,” he said tonelessly. “I know you didn’t mean to call King Swemmel a fool, but somebody else who was listening might get the idea you did. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

Leudast considered. If they arrested him for disloyalty to King Swemmel, they’d take him out of this Zuwayzi wilderness. He wouldn’t have to worry about black men who wanted to blaze him—or, as army rumor had it, to cut his throat and drink his blood. On the other hand, he would have to worry about Swemmel’s interrogators. He might escape the Zuwayzin. The interrogators… no.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” he replied at last. “I’ll watch what I say.”

“You’d better.” Magnulf wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his tunic. The Unkerlanters called the tunic’s color rock gray, but it didn’t match any of the rocks hereabouts, which were various ugly shades of yellow. That also struck Leudast as inefficient, but he kept his mouth shut about it. Magnulf went on, “I’ll even answer your question. The king wants this land back because it used to belong to Unkerlant, and so it ought to again.

And the Zuwayzin don’t want us to have it on account of it blocks our path toward better country farther north.”

“ Is there better country farther north?” Leudast asked, again speaking more freely than he should have. “Or does this miserable desert go on forever?”

“There’s supposed to be better country,” Magnulf said. “I suppose there must be better country—otherwise, the Zuwayzin couldn’t raise so many soldiers against us.”

That made sense. Along with the rest of the men in his company, Leudast slogged north. Thornbushes grew here and there among the rocks. Very little else did. Very little lived here, either—snakes and scorpions arid a few little pale foxes with enormous ears. Scavenger birds circled overhead, their wings looking as wide as those of dragons. They thought the Unkerlanter army would come to grief in the desert. Leudast remained far from sure they were wrong.

He tramped past a dead behemoth. The big beast hadn’t been blazed; its corpse bore no mark he could see. Maybe it had just keeled over from trying to haul the weight of its armor and weapons and riders through the desert. Since he felt like keeling over himself, Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the poor brute. The army had its own scavengers; they’d already taken away the ironmongery the behemoth had carried on its back.

Magnulf pointed. “There’s the line,” he said: Unkerlanters crouching and sprawling behind stones, blazing away at the Zuwayzin who blocked their path. As Leudast got down behind a rock himself so he could crawl forward, one of his countrymen shrieked and clutched at his shoulder. This terrain was made for defense. A handful of men could hold up an army here—and had.

“Come on, you reinforcements, take your places,” an officer shouted. “We’ll get those black bastards out of there soon enough—see if we don’t.” He ordered some of the soldiers already in line forward to flank out the Zuwayzin who’d stalled the advance.

Leudast blazed away at the rocks behind which the enemy sheltered. He had no idea whether his beams hit anyone. At the least, they made the Zuwayzin keep their heads down while his comrades slid around by the right flank.

But more Zuwayzin waited on the right. They hadn’t been blazing, perhaps hoping to draw the very attack the officer had commanded. They broke it. After a few minutes, Unkerlanters came streaming back to the main line, some of them helping wounded comrades escape the enemy’s beams.

When the Zuwayzin attacked in turn, the Unkerlanters threw them back. That cheered Leudast—till he heard an officer say, “We’re the ones who are supposed to be moving forward, curse it, not the black men.”

“Tell it to the Zuwayzin—maybe they haven’t heard,” somebody not far from Leudast muttered. That struck him as dangerously inefficient speech, but he wasn’t inclined to report it. For the moment, he was content to be able to hold his position and not have to retreat.

He swigged from his water bottle. That wouldn’t last indefinitely, and, except for the known water holes, the dowsers hadn’t had any luck finding new supplies. Leudast found himself unsurprised: if no water was out there to find, the best dowsers in the world couldn’t find it. That meant the army had to depend on the familiar holes and on what ley-line caravans and animals could bring forward. By the knots of mages Leudast had seen working along the ley lines, the Zuwayzin had done their best to make them impassable. That did nothing to add to his peace of mind.

And then he stopped worrying about such minor details as perhaps dying of thirst in a few days. Off to the left, the west, eggs smashed against stone. Leudast automatically hugged the ground. Hard on the heels of those roars came exultant cries in a language he did not know and despairing ones in a language he did: “The Zuwayzin! The Zuwayzin are on our flank!”